Is this diet balanced?

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I'm trying to create a meal plan because preparing on a daily basis is just too much work.

If I were to feed chicken RMBs like leg quarters and split breasts with boneless beef, maybe heart, tripe and pork. And beef liver and kidney and maybe pork liver plus a fish oil supplement. Is this a balanced enough diet that I could feed for awhile even for the life of a dog?

Yes. Add a little vitamin E to the mix too if you feed fish oil and not real fish.

And you would buy beef ribs and oxtail, any lamb and any cheap pork bones you happen to see to vary the diet. And if you saw turkey parts on sale you might buy them. When we have a roast turkey Max gets the neck, liver and some of the wings cut off before roasting of course.

The goal is to feed 2 parts of boneless meat to 1 pound of bony chicken in time. Might be a year, might be 6 months.

Just try to feed as much red meat as possible and remember to get some liver and other organ in and enough bony stuff to firm up the poop and done. Really. All the fuss I make about magnesium and such is extra. The tripe you are hoping to get will fill a couple of those annoying gaps.

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I haven't posted how I used to have to figure out Max's diet before freezer lately. I could hold about a month's worth of meals in the freezer so I would hold out for a good enough sale on red meat. Chicken is usually not a problem and organs don't usually go on sale.

Then I figured out how much chicken Max needs for a whole month. As a 38 pound senior dog on light rations he gets an average of 10 ounces a day. He would need 30 ounces of bone for the month and a chicken is about 30% bone so 30x3=90 ounces or about 5.5-6 pounds. He needs about 30 ounces of organ, easy a pound of some sort of liver and some sort of kidney. That adds up to 8 pounds and he needs 300 ounces a month or about 19 pounds total. 19-8=11 pounds of boneless meat to buy.

My shopping list was then 1 pound liver, 1 pound kidney, 1 enormous or 2 small chickens and 11 pounds of some sort of boneless meat.

I came home, got out all the bowls and the scale and cut up the organs and chicken, put them in bags and added boneless meat to make up the 10 ounces Max gets daily. I could buy all the same boneless meat or mix it up. It doesn't matter that the chicken neck bag has more boneless meat in it than the chicken thigh bag as you measured for the month and it will all even out.

Not easy to get one chicken into that many pieces at first but I managed as I cheated and Sassy got the meaty stuff for her cooked diet and Max got the bony stuff. Now I could make up boneless meals and bony meals and alternate them and it would work out really well. At first Max got 1/2 ounce of liver and 1/2 ounce of kidney daily but I managed to loosen up and just put an ounce of just one into the bags. If I was stuck without a freezer and went back to this way of shopping I would make up 2 or 3 day bags and feed bone and organ+meat to make up his ounces one day and meat only the next. If a day seems a bit light put in an egg, I like Max to get ~2 eggs a week.

If you have more room than I did you could do this every couple weeks with different combinations of different organs and meats and bony stuff too.

It goes faster to pack up than one would think too. At the end of the year I was packing up inside an hour. Put a cutting board in the sink and get lots of large bowls out. Open up the bags before starting and try to handle the meats with one hand and the bags with the other to keep things cleaner. And the dogs get to clean the bowls for you.

wow, I guess I typed something wrong and dogster cut off my entire post right after the first sentence. Sorry, I wrote up a whole book for you too basically.
I will come back to summarize later what I said.!!! I can't believe it deleted it!

I spent forever trying to come up with a good plan that was effective and easy to maintain. I found out that, for me, balancing over a period of 10 days was way easier than doing it per week.

I found out that chicken necks have about 1 oz of bone, so for Cookie who eats 3-4 oz a day, I just make sure to give her 4 chicken necks every 10 days. along with 1 oz organ cubes which I make with ice trays with beef liver, chicken liver, kidney, whatever I can find.

I bought these cute little dishwasher and freezer safe containers with snap lids, they hold 5 days worth of food for Cookie. I put 2 chicken necks in each one. I keep the organ cubes in freezer bags.

Thanks so much. I'm thinking I might actually be able to figure this out where before it seemed really overwhelming. I might buy a freezer off of craigslist so I can prepare a month at a time. I also have three dogs to feed so I need more space.

I'm trying to follow the rule of keeping everything I buy under $2/lb. Some things will be less, so I suppose spending a bit more on others would even out. What types of cuts as far as lamb and pork are OK to feed? Are you actually able to find these at a reasonable price?

I thought that beef bones are not edible and break teeth? Beef ribs and oxtail are OK to feed?

What you end up doing is being a big time meat hunter. I visit the meat counter looking for anything that is under my limit every time I am in the market. Last time I found several packs of beef ribs marked $1 off so I chose the lightest packs which cut the price down to $1.50 a pound, not great but he loves the things.

Beef leg bones are the ones to worry about and even then some dogs can eat the meat off without doing any grinding or trying to break the bone up. I didn't feed Max beef ribs for a while because he was trying to break the bone like it was a chicken wing but now he takes the meat off and gnaws on the end to get just the right amount of bone for that meal. Max is a very special dog! So this is know your dog! One might be great and another scare you with chicken necks or beef ribs. One might need more or less fat than another. One is likely to need longer to adjust to one meat or another.

I buy any meat below $1 that isn't enhanced and is in a large enough bit to feed safely. I buy any meat below $2 that is not enhanced, hasn't any bone and isn't too fatty. I pay more for beef and lamb than I will for pork and more for pork than I will for chicken. Max rarely gets lamb. It is always more expensive than beef and beef is somewhat higher in good stuff than lamb.

Pork is the cheapest red meat around here and lamb is the most expensive. I found a couple leg of lambs for $2 a pound years ago that I carried to the front of the store rather than chance somebody else snagging them.

If you get a freezer than you would have room for big boxes. Check wholesale places and ask the meat counter manager of the store you frequent if you can get a deal buying a whole box of some staples, especially beef, pork or lamb meat. Bone is cheap and easy to come by!

If one dog needs 11.2 oz of bone per week and a chicken is 30% bone. Say the chicken is 5 lbs, I would only need to buy 2 chickens as RMBs for the month? That doesn't sound right. I'm not sure how I would cut up the chicken to make big enough pieces so they don't gulp them down and yet make up enough bony meals for the week so that they don't have cannon butt.

You don't need to feed bone every day. Cookie gets two boney meals every 5 days.

If whole chickens are your best buy, then just cut them up into reasonable pieces, like a leg, a thigh, a back, etc. and just feed the pieces over the course of the the two months.

If just starting out and worried about runny poo, that's when you can go ahead and feed bone every day to make sure cannon butt doesn't happen. You don't have to worry that it's over 10%, it is just a transitioning technique.

But after the dog is used to eating raw meat, they should be able to handle an all meat meal. with a boney meal here and there.